Striking a blow against fascism with commentary on current events, finance, economics, politics, music, art, culture and how to deal with our economic lives being bartered away by the elites who have our financial future all figured out: We'll be paying off their debts forever.

If you like what you read here, please make a donation to Pottersville2. Peace to all and let's work to end the wars.

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." - Sydney Schanberg

"The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft, / And gathering swallows twitter in the skies." - John Keats

"It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen ... The world will present itself to you for its unmasking." - Franz Kafka

"“We of the craft are all crazy,” wrote Lord Byron about himself and his fellow poets. “Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”"

"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." - Albert Einstein

"In my lifetime we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. If this is evolution, I believe within twelve years we'll be voting for plants." - Lewis Black

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." – George Orwell

Senator Frank Church in 1975 chaired the Senate Hearings on the FBI’s Cointelpro operation, which spied upon and attempted to infiltrate, disrupt and discredit the peace movement. . . "if a dictator ever took over, (the NSA) could enable to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back. . . . That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. . . . I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

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Conservative Animus

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Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

Current Readers

Politicus USA on GOP Fascism

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The entire GOP apparatus is slipping toward fascism and millions of Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that the Bible none of them have read takes precedence over the Constitution none of them have read.

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Eco Farm Shitakes, Squash, Kale - Cindi, Nicole & Eddie

Ukraine Disinformation Battle: Little Green Men, Hamsters and the Fog of War

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There has always been a gap in how media on both sides of the former Iron Curtain have reported world events, and it’s growing as the crisis in Ukraine escalates. It has become increasingly difficult to obtain reliable information from any side — west, east, or further east — about what is going on in Eastern Ukraine.
While powerful propaganda machines fill the public space with smoke and mirrors, one of the few facts that can be positively established in Eastern Ukraine is that the body count is steadily growing: a testament of just how easy it is for self-interested foreign powers to start, either intentionally or recklessly, a civil war in the heart of Europe. Continuing coverage is available at this link and this link.

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Red Roots Farm - Kristen & Jason - No Sprays/Delicious Veggies!

Fukushima, Japan Disaster Worsens and Spreads

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While the American reactor industry continues to suck billions of dollars from the public treasury, its allies in the corporate media seem increasingly hesitant to cover the news of post-Fukushima Japan. Continuing coverage is available at this link, this link, and this link.

My Blog Fights Climate Change

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Animal Rescue - Click Everyday!

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Paul Krugman:

I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become.

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who, like me, spent most of the Bush years as a voice in the wilderness. And he pointed out something remarkable: although those of us who said the obvious — that the Bush administration was fundamentally monstrous — were ridiculed by all the respectable people at the time, at this point our narrative has become everyone’s narrative.

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Paul Craig Roberts:

_________________ US Media
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"Anyone who depends on print, TV, or right-wing talk radio media is totally misinformed. The Bush administration has achieved a de facto Ministry of Propaganda."

"The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the cold war. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media.

Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives — not by journalists — whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers.

Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home."

_________________ War On Terror
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Roberts asked "Is the War on Terror a Hoax", and claims it has "killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans of millions of Muslims in six countries". Roberts called the attacks "naked aggression" on civilian populations and infrastructure which constitute war crimes.

_________________ Republican Party
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Roberts is seriously dismayed by what he considers the Republican Party's disregard for the U.S. Constitution. He has even voiced his regret that he ever worked for it, avowing that, had he known what it would become, he would never have contributed to the Reagan Revolution.

_________________ American Democracy and Oligarchy
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Roberts has been increasingly critical of what he deems as the lessening of democracy in the U.S.; instead accusing it of being run by oligarchs by stating:

"The west prides itself that it is the standard for the world, that it is a democracy. But nowhere do you see democratic outcomes: not in Greece, not in Ireland, not in the UK, not here, the outcomes are always to punish the innocent and reward the guilty.

And that's what the Greeks are in the streets protesting. We see this all over the west. There is no democracy, there are oligarchies, some of these smaller European countries are not even run by their own governments, they are run by Wall Street... There is probably more democracy in China than there is in the west.

Revolution is the only answer... We are confronted with a curious situation. Throughout the west we think we have democracy, we hold ourselves up high, we demonize China, we talk about the mafia state of Russia, we talk about the Arabs and so on, but where is the democracy here?"

_________________ Farewell Speech
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"Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It,"

Roberts effectively announced his journalistic retirement. The article, published at Counterpunch.org, begins:

"There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest."

It proceeds to a bitter chronicle of the demise of American intellectual integrity, particularly that of financial journalists and economists. These have been thoroughly corrupted by monetary inducements to misrepresent and ignore what has been, in effect, the systematic dismantling of the nation's productive life, in the name of globalization.

He holds the members of his own journalistic profession largely responsible for abetting relentless outsourcing of American industry, thereby gutting the American middle class and effectively dooming the nation's future.

He describes his own ostracism from mainstream media access, the consequence of his relentless and unflinching criticism of the demolition process over the past decade. His column ends, "The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off."

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Liberal?

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal."

John F. Kennedy, 1960

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Citizen's United

"[T]his Court now concludes that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption. That speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that those officials are corrupt. And the appearance of influence or access will not cause the electorate to lose faith in this democracy."

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

So, Mr. Trump has admitted (so he said this week when questioned on TV) that he doesn't know who David Duke is or what the Ku Klux Klan has campaigned for since the end of the Civil War, or what repeating a quote by Mussolini* denotes to his audience, and therefore cannot be expected to comment when he is questioned about their endorsements.

Good to know.

And Hillary's troops have pre-fixed the super-delegates to vastly favor her candidacy when they vote at the Convention - without needing the backing of any actual voters.

Anyone remember what U.S. democracy was supposed to be about?

The vote totals in the Democratic races are way down from both 2012 and 2008, and the Republican voter numbers are way up, supposedly because they are motivated to go to the polls by the blue-collar/jobs message they are hearing from the tangled prose of Donald Trump(f).

No matter what he is really advocating (like even bigger tax cuts for those other million/billionaires in the top tax brackets).

The problem is not just the deafness of those who are determined to vote for Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton) without regard to their past actions or positions on controversial issues.

The problem is that the fervor so confidently voiced is reminiscent of famous mob activity that has brought catastrophic events to full flower in the past.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, once rejected by the Senate for a George W. Bush judicial appointment because of his ties to the KKK, is now a hard right senator from Alabama himself, and one of the most extreme racists in Congress. It came as no surprise to anyone yesterday when he announced he had finally formally endorsed Herr Trumpf for president, just as David Duke and several other Klan and white supremacist leaders had. (Herr, whose father was once arrested at a KKK rally in Queens and who had an anti-racist song written about him by Woody Guthrie, refused to disavow his KKK support and was delighted that he landed a senator, even a senator as out-of-the-mainstream as Sessions, before Ted Cruz did. On the far-right fringe, there was ecstasy over the endorsement.

Sessions, the intellectual leader of the future of the conservative movement, has provided the brainpower behind the populist nationalist revolt against political elites that’s been emerging since at least 2013 ... Sessions' backing Trump is a significant blow to both Rubio and Cruz, as now the powerful Alabamian will be putting his entire operation all in behind Trump.

...[All Trumpf's other] endorsements pale in comparison to Sessions’ backing of Trump, as the Alabamian senator is universally respected - and feared - inside the beltway in Washington. Sessions is known for his tough views on immigration and trade and has repeatedly aimed to push the Republican Party in a more populist, nationalist direction.

Sessions has helped frame the movement’s views on both issues - and more, like courts and judicial nominations, law and order and police matters, and on budgetary issues and the fiscal well-being of America - while maintaining a formidable political and policy operation that his allies view as invaluable and his enemies dread.

Even apart from the screaming match he had with Chris Wallace on Fox News (see the hilarious video up top), it hasn't been a good weekend for Cruz... although Democrats must have been kvelling when he went on TV to accuse Herr Trumpf of being in business with the Mafia - not, he reminded his fans, that that would keep him from supporting Herr when he wins the nomination... of course.

He told Jake Tapper, on CNN's "State of the Union" that if Trumpf wins the nomination Hillary will "probably" beat him, in part because of Herr's $100,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation. Cruz: "Listen, if Donald becomes president, who the heck knows what he would do? Even Donald doesn't know what he would do. And I think the challenges facing this country are too grave to roll the dice and risk losing the Supreme Court for a generation, risk yet more economic stagnation and risk on foreign policy allowing radical Islamic terrorism to continue to rise and threaten America."

On "This Week," Cruz rolled out the Mafia stories about Trumpf's long associations with Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of New York's Gambino family, both of whom were also intimately tied to Staten Island Republican Congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm, currently in prison on a number of fraud convictions.

Cruz sent out a really unflattering 1990 portrait of Trumpf in "Vanity Fair" by Marie Brenner. Cruz focused on repulsive statements by Trumpf like, talking about his divorce settlement with Ivana and the sympathy she was getting in the tabloids, "When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass - a good one! - there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left." What he ignored were things that Democrats wouldn't, like sleazy McCarthyite Roy Cohn having been Trumpf's lawyer, ally and political mentor.

Trump once told a reporter that "If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy. People will drop a suit just by getting a letter with Roy’s name at the bottom." He represented Trumpf in his countersuit against the government when they caught him systematically discriminating against blacks in his residential buildings. Cohn was the man who brought Trumpf into the Mafia circles Cruz was hissing about on TV yesterday. Before he was disbarred for unethical practices, Cohn was the attorney for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, an eventual Trumpf business associate.

Meanwhile, on another end of the GOP, poor Miss McConnell, sensing he'll be going back to minority leader in January, is telling vulnerable Republican senators to take out TV ads against Trumpf during the general election.

While still hopeful that Mr. Rubio might prevail, Mr. McConnell has begun preparing senators for the prospect of a Trump nomination, assuring them that, if it threatened to harm them in the general election, they could run negative ads about Mr. Trump to create space between him and Republican senators seeking re-election. Mr. McConnell has raised the possibility of treating Mr. Trump’s loss as a given and describing a Republican Senate to voters as a necessary check on a President Hillary Clinton ... McConnell has said, “We’ll drop him like a hot rock,” according to his colleagues.

John McCain didn't need any advice from McConnell about going after Trumpf. Sources close to his campaign say he is relishing the idea of attacking Trumpf and rendering him unelectable in Arizona, although a powerful ad from Ann Kirkpatrick, the extremely flawed conservative Democrat running against McCain, would have you believe that McCain is just another McCain lap dog now. Do remember though, that Trumpf is not without heavy-duty allies in Arizona Republican politics and he could certainly do some rendering of his own if he chose to. And he is known to be a vindictive fellow. Other Senate Republicans most in jeopardy of losing their seats with Trumpf on top of the ticket are Ron Johnson (WI), Mark Kirk (IL), Kelly Ayotte (NH), Rob Portman (OH), Pat Toomey (PA), Richard Burr (NC) plus GOP candidates Joe Heck (NV) and whomever the Republicans wind up with in Florida and Colorado.

If things go really bad(ly) for them, Chuck Grassley (IA), Roy Blunt (MO) and John Boozman (AR) could also be looking at trouble. If all of those races go badly (for) the GOP, it means the 2018 midterms are unlikely to win the Senate back for the Republicans. Luckily for the Republican, Chuck Schumer - in other words, Wall Street - has taken effective control of the DSCC and is working to insert candidates who cannot win in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, while ceding North Carolina, Iowa and Arkansas to the Republicans.

The NRSC is going to soon understand how lucky the NRCC was all these years with Rahm Emanuel, Chris Van Hollen and Steve Israel at the helm of the DCCC.

By the way, you can help elect a more progressive U.S. Senate here and thwart both McConnell and Schumer. . .

* In 1912 Mussolini was the leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).[5] Prior to 1914 he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland [6] that organised the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917. Mussolini was expelled from the PSI due to his opposition to the party's stance on neutrality in World War I. Mussolini denounced the PSI, and later founded the fascist movement. Following the March on Rome in October 1922 he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014. After destroying all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, [7] Mussolini and his fascist followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years he had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means, aspiring to create a totalitarian state. Mussolini remained in power until he was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943. A few months later, he became the leader of the Italian Social Republic, a German client regime in northern Italy; he held this post until his death in 1945. [8]

And Charles the Piercer has put the hidden historical evidence, courtesy of Oliver Stone's persistence, to bed. Our bed.

here's no more valuable resource for an informed citizenry than the folks doing god's work at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University. Their most recent revelations concern the Rockefeller Commission, which was formed by the Ford Administration as a reaction to the New York Times stories in 1975 that broke the news of the CIA's misdeeds, up to and including covert assassinations. It seems that kindly old Gerry and his minions did all they could to ratfck the commission's report. And, lo and behold, you'll never guess who was leading the fcking of the rats.

The Gerald Ford White House significantly altered the final report of the supposedly independent 1975 Rockefeller Commission investigating CIA domestic activities, over the objections of senior Commission staff, according to internal White House and Commission documents posted today by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University(www.nsarchive.org). The changes included removal of an entire 86-page section on CIA assassination plots and numerous edits to the report by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney. Today's posting includes the entire suppressed section on assassination attempts, Cheney's handwritten marginal notes, staff memos warning of the fallout of deleting the controversial section, and White House strategies for presenting the edited report to the public. The documents show that the leadership of the presidentially-appointed commission deliberately curtailed the investigation and ceded its independence to White House political operatives.

Richard Cheney cares less about American democracy than he cares who he shoots in the face. And this has been true since he first crawled out of the primordial authoritarian soup. He would have been the perfect Hauptfuhrer, the ideal Politburo conniver. He'd have risen high in the Stasi, and Pinochet would have had him over for Scotch and electrodes at least twice a week. And the great irony of this latest expose is that we can at least partly thank Oliver Stone for it.

This evidence has been lying ignored in government vaults for decades. Much of the work of securing release of the records was done by the John F. Kennedy Assassinations Records Board in the 1990s, and the documents were located at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland; or at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additional mandatory declassification review requests filed by Archive fellow John Prados returned identical versions of documents, indicating the CIA is not willing to permit the public to see any more of the assassinations story than we show here. The documents in this set have yet to be incorporated into standard accounts of the events of this period.

And, to the surprise of practically nobody, these documents show that a lot of the internal wrangling within the Rockefeller Commission traced its roots all the way back to Dallas in 1963.

There had already been revelations of illegal domestic activities by the CIA. These led to the creation of a presidential panel under Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, and committees of inquiry in both houses of the United States Congress. Ford's January 1975 admission of CIA involvement posed a dilemma for the administration. Vice President Rockefeller attempted to head off inclusion of the subject, restricting consideration of assassinations to the question of what role Cuba might have had in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

That proved unacceptable to some members of his own commission, among them then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan. When the Rockefeller Commission took a vote on whether to include charges of CIA assassination plots in its inquiry, the group overrode its own chairman. Rockefeller's key opponent in the fight over investigating assassinations was the panel's staff director, David W. Belin. A lawyer for the Warren Commission, empanelled to look into the Kennedy assassination in 1963-1964, Belin had been handpicked by Ford for the Rockefeller group. Ford, one of the Warren commissioners, was confident of Belin's loyalty, but this time the lawyer fought hard to investigate deeply.

When even a Warren Commission lawyer smells a bag job, you can be pretty sure that there's burlap over something important.

Among the abuses that led directly to President Ford creating the Rockefeller Commission were charges the CIA had compiled dossiers on American citizens and infiltrated political groups that opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam. In this instance the Rockefeller panelists entered a blanket finding that the files and lists of citizen dissenters were "improper."

The White House edit changed this conclusion, indicating that the "standards applied" had resulted in materials "not needed for legitimate intelligence or security purposes," and that this merely applied to "many" records gathered about the antiwar movement (see unnumbered page revising p. 41 in the report). White House editors eliminated a Commission recommendation (number 17 in the original text) that applicants for agency positions and foreign nationals acting on behalf of the CIA be informed more clearly that they could be subjects of U.S. security investigations.

Bernie Sanders, remember, is a kooky extremist because, at the exact time Cheney was developing his authoritarian chops and becoming the most loathsome government apparatchik since A. Mitchell Palmer, Sanders said that it might be good idea to reduce the CIA to smithereens. Crazy talk.

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Beth and Lily Calmly Monitor Farmers Market Traffic

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Oscar Wilde

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

Harold Pinter

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless... while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Chickenhawks Galore

Peace

"A man of peace is not a pacifist; a man of peace is simply a pool of silence. He pulsates a new kind of energy into the world, he sings a new song. He lives in a totally new way his very way of live is that of grace, that of prayer, that of compassion. Whomsoever he touches, he creates more love-energy. The man of peace is creative. He is not against war, because to be against anything is to be at war. He is not against war; he simply understands why war exists. And out of that understanding he becomes peaceful. Only when there are many people who are pools of peace, silence, understanding, will the war disappear."